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9. Inflectional categories of nouns and verbs

9.3. Noun classes

In grammar, gender refers to noun classes. In languages with extensive gender systems, all nouns belong to a noun class which is part of the lexical entry of that noun. Other words in the phrase will agree with the gender of the noun. For example, Russian nouns trigger agreement on the verb, as shown in (14). With a masculine noun such as žurnal ‘magazine’ in (14a), the verb appears in the masculine bare form. With a feminine noun such as kniga ‘book’ in (14b), the verb appears with the feminine suffix -a. Finally, with a neuter noun such as pis’mo ‘letter’ in (14b), the verb appears with the neuter suffix -o.

(14) a. Žurnal ležal na stole.

magazine lay.M on table.

‘The magazine laid on the table.’

b. Kniga ležal-a na stole.

book lay-F on table

‘The book lay on the table.’

c. Pis’mo ležal-o na stole.

letter lay-N on table.

‘The letter lay on the table’

Russian (Corbett 2013)

In some languages, the noun class is marked explicitly with a morpheme on the noun, but in other languages, it only shows up on other words that agree with the noun, as with the Russian example in (14).

In SiSwati, a Bantu language spoken in Eswatini and South Africa, the noun class markers are indicated both on the noun and the words that agree with it, such as adjectives. This is illustrated below in (15) for class 2 marker ba- in (15a), class 3 marker li- in (15b) and class 7 marker si- in (15c). Note that, unlike in many Indo-European languages, the noun classes in Bantu languages like SiSwati are not based on gender. Instead all of the human nouns belong to class 1 (when singular) and class 2 (when plural).

(15) a. ba-fati la-ba-khulu

Cl2.PL-woman ADJ-Cl2.PL-big

‘big women’

b. li-ɬombe le-li-khulu

Cl3.SG-shoulder ADJ-CL3.SG-big

‘big shoulder’

c. si-lwane le-si-khulu

Cl7.SG-animal ADJ-Cl7.SG-big

‘big animal’

In some languages, nouns belonging to different classes have distinct inflectional paradigms. This occurs in Russian, for example, as shown in Table 5. Notice how each gender has different suffixes for each case category.

Table 5. Inflectional paradigms of different gender singular nouns in Russian
Inflectional class Gender Nominative Accusative Genitive Dative Instrumental Locative Gloss
I masculine žurnal žurnal žurnala žurnalu žurnalom žurnale ‘magazine’
II feminine gazeta gazetu gazety gazete gazetoj gazete ‘newspaper’
III feminine kost’ kost’ kosti kosti kost’ju kosti ‘bone’
IV neuter pis’mo pis’mo pis’ma pis’mu pis’mom pis’me ‘letter’

 

The different meanings of sex and gender

Many people confuse the terms sex and gender. To make matters even more confusing, linguists use gender in more than one way. Let’s define these terms precisely so that we can be clear about what we mean.

Sex

Definition: A set of biological attributes in humans and animals, including hormone level and expression, reproductive anatomy, chromosomes, and gene expression (CIHR 2023).

Categories: Sex is usually divided into male and female, but there is variation in how these different biological attributes are expressed, including some who have attributes of both sexes or neither (Fausto-Sterling 2000).

Property of: People and animals.

(Personal) gender

Definition: The socially constructed roles, behaviours, and expressions of a person based on how people perceive themselves and interact with others (CIHR 2023).

Categories: Some common gender categories include woman, man, girl, boy, or non-binary person (CIHR 2023).

Property of: People and maybe animals.

Semantic gender

Definition: Nouns that refer to people or animals sometimes carry semantic gender, which means that the personal gender of the person it refers to (or the sex of an animal) is encoded in the meaning of the word. This includes words like sister and brother, for which the semantic gender is part of the root word, but also words like duke and duchess, which include semantic gender in a separate morpheme. An increasing number of non-binary forms are being coined, such as nibling for the child of a sibling.

Categories: Depending on the context, these may be referred to as male, female, and unspecified, or as masculine, feminine, and epicene.

Property of: Words, mostly nouns. Morphemes encoding primarily semantic gender are usually derivational morphemes.

Grammatical gender

Definition: Grammatical gender refers to noun classes in grammar. Unlike semantic gender, these noun classes may trigger agreement in other words or determine which inflectional paradigm a word uses.

Categories: In some languages, including many Indo-European languages, grammatical gender has distinctions between masculine and feminine or between masculine, feminine, and neuter. Other languages, including many Algonquian languages, have distinctions between animate and inanimate nouns. Languages in the Bantu family have approximately 16 noun classes (half singular and half plural), and all humans belong to the same noun class, as we saw for SiSwati above in example (15).

Property of: Words, mostly nouns. Morphemes encoding grammatical gender are usually inflectional morphemes.

In languages which use grammatical gender, many nouns may have a grammatical gender which corresponds to the semantic gender of the entity to which it refers, but there are also nouns which do not have semantic gender and are assigned grammatical gender arbitrarily. For example, milk does not have semantic gender, and it is arbitrarily assigned masculine gender in French and feminine gender in Spanish, as shown in (16).

(16) a. le lait

DEF.SG.M milk
‘the milk’

French

b. la leche
DEF.SG.F milk
‘the milk’
Spanish

There are are even nouns that have a semantic gender that doesn’t match its grammatical gender. One rather well-known example of this is the German word mädchen ‘girl’ which is semantically female but grammatically neuter.

(17) das mädchen

NOM.DEF.SG.N girl

‘girl’
German

The distinction between semantic and grammatical properties can also be made for other inflectional categories, including number (as we saw earlier for pants and scissors) and animacy. For example, in Meskwaki, an Algonquian language from the Iowa region, most plants use inanimate gender in everyday use, but may be marked with animate gender when they are being spoken to or in religious contexts. This is illustrated below for strawberry in (18).

(18) a. ahteːhimin-i

strawberry-SG.INAN

‘strawberry (inanimate)’

b. ahteːhimin-a

strawberry-SG.AN

‘strawberry (animate), when addressed’

Meskwaki (Dahlstrom 1995: 58)

On the other hand, the noun raspberry is always animate—even in everyday contexts—and cannot appear with inanimate gender.

(19) a. wiːtawiːh-a

raspberry-SG.AN

‘raspberry’
b. *wiːtawiːh-i

raspberry-SG.INAN

Meskwaki (Dahlstrom 1995: 58)

 

Singular you and they

In English, the pronoun you is used for both the singular and plural, but this was not always the case. You started out as a plural pronoun, and the pronouns thou (nominative), thee (accusative), and thy (genitive) were the singular pronouns. Here are some examples of the archaic singular pronoun from the Shakespeare play Hamlet.

(11) a. Thou seest the heavens (Act II Scene IV)

b. I’ll give thee a wind. (Act I Scene III)

c. …and everyone did bear thy praises in his kingdom’s great defence (Act I Scene III)

In Early Modern English, at the time of Shakespeare, you could be used as a plural pronoun or it could be used as a singular pronoun in more formal contexts and to show respect to the addressee. Over time, the polite you form became more and more common. Some prescriptivists didn’t like this change and complained about it, as illustrated by the quote below.

There has never been a greater perversion of language than the using the pronoun you, in the place of thou. […] Using you for thou causes us to depart from some of the fundamental rules of grammar. For example: we are taught that “a verb should agree with its nominative number and person.”

-Thomas 1857: 114-115

Now, in modern English, you is firmly established as a singular pronoun, replacing thou/thee/thy entirely. Some dialects have even coined new plural pronouns such as y’all or youse to re-establish the distinction between second person singular and plural.

Using the plural pronoun to show respect to single addressees is also used in other languages. For example the plural second person pronoun vous is used as a polite form to address single addressees in French, instead of the singular second person pronoun tu, which, depending on the dialect, is used only for close friends and family.

The pronoun they also originated as a plural pronoun but has been used as a singular pronoun in certain contexts since at least the 1400s (Balhorn 2004). Since the other third person singular pronouns specify gender or animacy, singular they is often used when the gender is unknown or irrelevant, as in (12).

(12) a. (Seeing an unidentified distant figure ) They‘re waving at us.

b. (After answering a phone call) They had the wrong number.

(Bjorkman 2017: 1)

Singular they was also used when it referred back to a noun modified by a quantifer, even if the gender was specified, as shown through the historical examples in (13).

(13) a. Shakespeare (A Comedy of Errors, 1623)

There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me
As if I were their well-acquainted friend

b. Austen (Pride and Prejudice, 1813)

Both sisters were uncomfortable enough. Each felt for the other, and of course for themselves.

(Bjorkman 2017: 3)

More recently, they has begun to be used as a singular pronoun for specific people whose gender is known. Some modern English speakers accept neither the sentences in (14) or (15). Some accept the sentences in (14) but not (15), and some accept all of the sentences in both (14) and (15). Sentences that are grammatical for some people but not all are marked with a percentage sign (%). Subscript letters, called co-indexes, are included beside nouns to show that they refer to the same entity.

(14) a. %The professori said theyi cancelled the exam.

b. %Our eldest childi broke theiri leg.

c. %I’ll let my cousini introduce themselvesi.

(Bjorkman 2017: 2)

(15) a. %Janeti said theyi cancelled the exam.

b. %Thomasi broke theiri leg.

c. %I’ll let my sisteri introduce themselvesi.

(Bjorkman 2017: 2)

Several different researchers have suggested that the different judgment patterns for sentences like those in (14)-(15) are the result of a few small differences in people’s grammar. Bjorkman (2017) argues that some people have a grammar that requires referential nouns to be specified for gender, even if it is not morphologically marked, while others have a grammar that allows nouns to be unspecified for gender. Konnelly and Cowper (2020) argue that there are three distinct grammars for they in competition, representing different stages of a change in progress, as described in (15).

(15) a. Stage 1 singular they: (quantified antecedent, or antecedent of unknown/irrelevant gender), as shown in (12)-(13)

b. Stage 2 singular they: antecedent of known gender, but ungendered description//name, as in (14)

c. Stage 3 singular they: antecedent of any gender, no restriction on description/name, as in (15)

Camilliere et al. (2021) did a sociolinguistic study that shows that people’s linguistic behaviour does cluster into the three distinct patterns proposed by Konnelly and Cowper. How people rate singular they in different contexts is correlated with social attitudes toward transgender people and prescriptivist language, as well as age and social distance between the speaker and the referent of the pronoun.

Some people feel like gendered pronouns like she or he do not fit them and may request that others refer to them by using they. We can show respect for them by using the pronouns that they request. However, sometimes even people who want to use singular they to refer to specific people may struggle to because their grammar is more restrictive, and they may find the change in usage difficult to acquire at first. The good news, though, is that learning and internalizing a new grammar is entirely possible with practice! Kirby Conrod, a linguist who uses they pronouns, gives some tips on how to do that in their blog.

Classifiers

Classifiers are similar to gender, in that nouns are lexically assigned to different groups, often based on some semantic criteria. However, unlike gender, classifiers do not trigger agreement on other words and there may be hundreds of classifiers in use in a given language.

Mandarin is one example of a language that uses noun classifiers. In Mandarin, nouns must always be marked with a classifier when they are combined with a numeral, as shown in (20). The classifiers can indicate either individual objects, as in (20a), or containers, as in (20b) and (20c).

(20) a. liang ben shu

two CL book

‘two books’

b. liang xiang shu

two CL:box book

‘two boxes of books’

c. liang ping jiu
two CL:bottle wine
‘two bottles of wine’

Mandarin (Zhang 2007: 45)

Classifiers in Mandarin often encode the shape of the object. For example, the classifier tiao indicates long and rope-like objects. Words such as she ‘snake’, tui ‘leg’, kuzi  ‘pair of pants’, he ‘river’, and bandeng ‘bench’ all appear with the classifier tiao (Zhang 2007: 44). Classifier ke is used for small, solid, and kernel-like objects, such as huangdou ‘soybean’, ya ‘tooth’, dingzi ‘nail’, and zidan ‘bullet’ (Zhang 2007: 46).

Classifiers can also appear on the verb in some languages, to indicate the semantic properties of one of its arguments. This is how handshape classifiers are often used in American Sign Language. It also occurs in spoken language. For example, in the Papuan language Waris, the classifier put- ’round objects’ indicates that the object argument, a coconut, is round.

(21) sa ka-m put-ra-ho-o

coconut 1SG-to VCL:ROUND-get-BENEFACT-IMPERATIVE

‘Give me a coconut’ (lit. coconut to-me round.one-give)

Waris (Aikhenvald 2000: 3)

Key takeaways

Check yourself!

References and further resources

For a general audience

Canadian Institutes of Health Research. 2023. What is gender? What is sex? https://cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/48642.html

Conrod, Kirby. 2020. Pronouns 101: Introduction to your loved one’s new pronouns. Medium. https://kconrod.medium.com/pronouns-101-introduction-to-your-loved-ones-new-pronouns-3fef080266d0

Fausto-Sterling, Anne. 2000. Sexing the Body. New York: Basic Books.

McCulloch, Gretchen, and Kirby Conrod. 2020. The grammar of singular they: Interview with Kirby Conrod. Lingthusiasm episode 43. https://lingthusiasm.com/post/615600862742609920/lingthusiasm-episode-43-the-grammar-of-singular

Thomas, P.B. 1857. Thou and you. The R.I. Schoolmaster 3 (4): 114-115.

Academic sources

Aikhenvald, Alexandra. 2000. Classifiers: A typology of noun categorization devices. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Balhorn, Mark. 2004. The rise of epicene they. Journal of English Linguistics 32 (2): 79-166.

Bjorkman, Bronwyn. 2017. Singular they and the syntactic representation of gender in English. Glossa 2 (1): 80.

Camilliere, Sadie, Amanda Izes, Olivia Leventhal, and Daniel J. Grodner. 2021. They is changing: Pragmatic and grammatical factors that license singular they. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 43: 1542-1548. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3tc9s9b0

Corbett, Greville. 2013. Number of genders. In WALS, ed. Matthew Dryer and Martin Haspelmath. Zenodo. https://wals.info/chapter/30

Dahlstrom, Amy. 1995. Motivation vs. predictability in Algonquian gender. In Papers of the 26th Algonquian Conference, ed. David Pentland. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba. 52-66.

Konnelly, Lex, & Elizabeth Cowper. 2020. Gender diversity and morphosyntax: An account of singular they. Glossa 5 (1): 40.

Thomas, P.B. 1857. Thou and you. The R. I. Schoolmaster 3 (4): 114-115. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44786667

Zhang, Hong. 2007. Numeral classifiers in Mandarin Chinese. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 16 (1): 43-59.

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